foolosophy

If you’re not paying attention to what is happening in India, my friends, you should. Secular democracy is under threat from ethnonationalist extremists in the world’s second largest country & largest democracy, housing 1/5th of humanity. https://t.co/K9D9PwE7eA

A counter-proposal: the most important things in life are those you neglect in your attempts to appear superficially informed on issues about which you can meaningfully do nothing.

“And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you.”

The Right is now having a new version of an old fight. Is a person’s success or failure mainly dependent on his personal choices or on the operation of larger, impersonal forces over which he has no control? The key word here is “mainly.” No reasonable person believes that economics, culture, and history have no influence over human choices. At the same time, no reasonable person believes that individuals — especially in contemporary America — are entirely imprisoned by circumstance.

…The populist wave built, and with it a tale that sounded very strange to conservative ears. The struggling white working class had been victimized. It needed primarily a political rescue. The notion that the government can help at the margins but that self-improvement is mainly up to the individual was replaced by an angry victim narrative. And the victimizers? The “elites,” of course.

History isn’t just “one damn thing after another,” of course; it seems more like “the same few damn things over and over again in recurrent cycles.” In his book The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch complained about the trendy mindset that saw the decade (or perhaps the generation) as the basic unit of historical time. Analyzing history in bite-sized ten-year chunks, he argued, encouraged a shallow perspective better suited to observing fashion trends and consumer goods. And yet, the longer I live, the harder it is to avoid the impression that every “new” idea is just one that’s been out of fashion long enough for an increasingly attention-deficient culture to have forgotten why it was discarded in the first place. The “rational” alternative to the revitalized socialism of both the national and international varieties is a STEM-mongering liberalism in thrall to the technocratic delusions of Auguste Comte. History seems like just as much of an absurd joke viewed through the wide-angle lens.

Schopenhauer, with his usual perkiness, said that human existence was primarily an oscillation between boredom and despair. A less-morbid perspective might say that there is a virtuous mean worth aiming for, however difficult it is to attain it, but most people occupy themselves rushing back and forth between the stupid ideas on either side of it.

Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life. I eat well, meaning I choose foods that taste good and that will stave off hunger for as long as possible, like protein, fiber, and fats. I exercise—not because it will make me live longer but because it feels good when I do. As for medical care: I will seek help for an urgent problem, but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me.

In her recent article for Harper’s, Lionel Shriver raised a point that I hadn’t precisely considered before. Comparing it to the current enthusiasm for demanding “total social and professional exile” for thought-criminals, she noted that during the O.J. Simpson trial in the mid-’90s, for the infinitely more serious crime of double murder, there was no equivalent demand to give his previous sporting and acting careers the collective silent treatment, to erase them from cultural memory. Were we more mature and sagacious then, capable of handling ambiguity, or did our vindictiveness simply lack the laserlike intensity that social media would later provide?

Anthony Kronman, in his magnum opus Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, explored the theme at length: having posited that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and completely free to act according to his own uncaused will, envious Westerners set out to usurp his throne and claim these qualities for themselves through scientific mastery. But what would we do if we had a God-like power to control and optimize existence? What vision of the Good motivates us, exactly? A life of unrestricted choice, free of suffering? What if our desire to eradicate all the “bad” parts of life, from the personal to the political, is just the immaturity of the perpetual adolescent who only wants to affirm a comfortable life of video games and junk food while wearing earbuds to ignore the sound of the responsibilities and tragedies of adulthood pounding on the locked bedroom door?

Ehrenreich has come to the conclusion that freedom paradoxically comes from relinquishing the obsessive desire for control, from accepting that ultimately “only one ship is seeking us.” A life spent in paranoid anxiety over optimizing one’s health is not worth extra decades or centuries of existence, no matter how many tools we develop to make it possible. Likewise, a life spent enraged by the idea that our fellow citizens are thinking the wrong thoughts or pressing the wrong button in the voting booth is a waste of time. The body politic can’t be purified and indefinitely preserved any more than ours can, and the efforts to do so will be rife with unintended consequences.

The “moment” is brokenly understood by moderns who assign it a hedonism of spirit, a false epicureanism. For the ancient Chinese poets, as Taoists or Buddhists, the moment is the instance of the Tao to be understood. It is to treasure the snow in winter and not long for the flowers of spring. It is to treasure the fruit of summer and not rue the coming autumn; it is to treasure the falling leaves of autumn and not reflect on the snows of winter. It is to appreciate the moment before it is gone and not to resent its passing, not to rue what is gone or what is to follow.

Alan Watts wrote about the way self-consciousness interferes with our ability to do this — “as when, in the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion. Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy—so as to be sure not to miss anything.” I recognized the reflection of my own restless monkey-mind in these words when I encountered them, but even now, two decades later, it hardly seems to have aged a day.

It has been a very busy, tiring week. Too often I found myself out of sorts, wanting to be somewhere else doing something else, even as I recognize that the grass will be just as dry and brown on that side of the fence too. In a moment of late-night reflection, I remind myself that if I can’t return to these necessary tasks in good humor tomorrow, when will I ever? What miracle do I imagine will come along and transform the tedium of everyday maintenance into playfulness? It will come from me or not at all. And yet, as Auden wrote:

We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

Let me see if I can describe what I actually do each day. I’ll be sitting there, trying to do good Shikantaza for quite literally the 723rd time that year alone. And some thought comes along. And I get interested in that thought. What if I wrote a rock musical based on the life of Buddha? Maybe it would be as big as Jesus Christ Superstar! I could get Zero Defex to play it live at the Highland Theater in Akron.

No thoughts intrude for a while. Nice. Nice word, that. Nice. So many ways you can say it. Noice! Or maybe Cockney. Naaaaice, guv’na! Or Nice, France. That’s spelled like nice but pronounced Nice. If I wrote that in a blog how would I make it clear…

What’s that smell? Should I tell someone about that smell? How can I tell someone about that smell without making any noise? Noise annoys! I love the Buzzcocks. So sad Pete Shelly died.

And so on.

That’s the way Shikantaza goes for me and I’ve been doing it roughly two times a day since the Autumn of 1983.

In a letter to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, C.S. Lewis noticed his own attempts at meditation bedeviled by a more consistent, but still maddening, form of “monkey mind”:

During my afternoon “meditations,” — which I at least attempt quite regularly now — I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sorts of thoughts that do come. And, will you believe it, one of every three is a thought of self-admiration: when everything else fails, having had its neck broken, up comes the thought “What an admirable fellow I am to have broken their necks!” I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day long. I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly realise I am really thinking how frightfully clever I’m going to be and how he will admire me….And then when you force yourself to stop it, you admire yourself for doing that. It is like fighting the hydra….There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self-love and self-admiration.

Blaise Pascal famously said that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Like many great aphorisms, this has two sharp edges to it. For many people, this intuitively seems like an endorsement of introversion; quoting it can be a way of feeling superior to the madding crowd’s ignoble strife. I haven’t checked, but I’d be willing to bet that there exists a Caspar David Friedrich image with the Pascal aphorism atop it decorating some disaffected adolescent’s Pinterest page. In context, though, Pascal seems to be describing what Warner, Lewis, and countless other meditators have all discovered — the tragedy of the human condition is present in the microcosm of one person’s mind no less than the grand scheme of world events. There is no escape from it, not even by “thinking the right thoughts.” As Warner says in another post, meditation practice is not trivial. Far from being just another productivity enhancer, stress reliever, or “lifehack” {shudder}, being alone with your thoughts for long enough will bring you face to face with the grinning unknown.

There are memes circulating that are known as ‘bingo cards’, in which each square is filled with a typical statement or trait of a person who belongs to a given constituency, a mouth-breathing mom’s-basement-dwelling Reddit-using Mens’s Rights Activist, for example, or, say, an unctuous white male ally of POC feminism. The idea is that within this grid there is an exhaustive and as it were a priori tabulation, deduced like Kant’s categories of the understanding, of all the possible moves a member of one of these groups might make, and whenever the poor sap tries to state his considered view, his opponent need only pull out the table and point to the corresponding box, thus revealing to him that it is not actually a considered view at all, but only an algorithmically predictable bit of output from the particular program he is running. The sap is sapped of his subjectivity, of his belief that he, properly speaking, has views at all.

Who has not found themselves thrust into the uncomfortable position just described, of being told that what we thought were our considered beliefs are in fact something else entirely?

I have to admit that one of the most useful goads to my own intellectual growth has been that still, small voice that wonders, “Wait a minute…am I a cliché?”

For example, when I was nineteen, I thought this book was the most profound thing I’d ever read. Yes, I know. Do be kind, and try to keep your laughter muffled. Still, even though I was emotionally predisposed to give myself completely over to the romanticism of nature worship and Noble Savage-ism, I managed to outgrow it, in no small part because I was aware of the fact that many other people treated it dismissively. Why are those people over there laughing at me? What do they know that I don’t? The thought that others might have already investigated the object of my enthusiasm and found it lacking worried me like a pebble in my shoe. I couldn’t rest comfortably until I had seen myself from their perspective. I seemed congenitally incapable of the self-assurance of the true believer who confidently dismisses all critics as envious fools.

The Lady of the House has a friend who is a man of intense and varying enthusiasms. At forty years old, he has a predilection for the sort of self-aggrandizing self-improvement schemes that you would normally associate with precocious adolescents. From foodie fads, to his conspicuous contrarianism regarding the ordinary habits and conventions of social life, to his current obsession with biohacking, his optimizing never rests. I’ve never seen anyone who better exemplifies Chesterton’s line about how the danger isn’t that people will believe in nothing without God, it’s that they’ll believe in anything. He thinks of himself as proudly atheist, yet everything about him hums with the intensity of someone who yearns, more than anything, to believe, to devote himself to a cause. Each new enthusiasm is described with the zeal of the newly-converted. He is a perfect example of what a former age would have called a holy fool. And yet, he seems serenely untroubled by doubt, well-practiced at rationalizing objections away, completely oblivious to the possibility that his heartfelt convictions might be just so many squares on someone else’s bingo card.

The bingo-card formula of argument is maddening precisely because it is dehumanizing. We would rather be accused of evil than predictability. Being evil would at least be satisfying to the ego; it would place us beyond the comprehensible and flatter our vanity with other people’s fear. Contempt and dismissal is far more wounding. To be told that all of our subjective experience is merely the predictable unfolding of a preprogrammed script is to feel ourselves as a powerless object of study in a laboratory, to be perfectly under someone else’s control. Nothing is more satisfying in an argument than to toy with your opponent, holding him securely at arm’s length while he flails and thrashes futilely. Ideally, we should resist that urge to thoroughly dominate someone, but realistically, domination is such a visible and gratifying example of mastery, whereas understanding is more passive and hidden. Most of us can’t resist the urge to show off, to demonstrate our understanding in an active way, to prove that we have anticipated every counter, blocked off every escape route, and left our opponent at our mercy. Perhaps the best we can do is to turn that imprisoning gaze on ourselves, attempting to box ourselves in, and surprise ourselves with our endless ability to adapt and escape.

To me there is an aura of grandeur about the dull routine of maintenance: I see it as a defiance of the teeth of time. It is easier to build than to maintain. Even a lethargic or debilitated population can be galvanized for a while to achieve something impressive, but the energy which goes into maintaining things in good repair day in, day out is the energy of true vigor.

Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele used to work for the NYC Parks and Rec department before the band became popular. He often spoke fondly of his days there, saying that he only gave the job up because the rest of the band wanted the full-time life of rock musicians; he would have been content to keep music as a hobby. His amused bandmates would recount stories of how Steele, when feeling stressed while on tour, would grab a broom and start sweeping the floor of the venue where they were playing. It was his way of making order out of chaos, and, to some extent, reminding himself of simpler, happier times.

I also practice Steele’s method of stress reduction. When angry or anxious, I instinctively channel that energy into household chores. It doesn’t take depth psychology to see this as a means of coping with a breach in the defenses of my psychological city-state. When the tendrils of chaos start creeping in somewhere, I immediately go on patrol around the perimeter, looking to reinforce any other weak spots. I realize this may be a bit odd, but as far as quirks go, at least this one is constructive. If character is fate, perhaps my overall fastidiousness marked me as temperamentally conservative from the start — I start from the assumption that all valuable things are fragile and the threat of entropy and disaster requires constant vigilance. It’s not even that I think this way; it’s more like it’s in my marrow. For many people, it may seem overly gloomy or pessimistic to assume the glass is half-empty, but honestly, I feel conscious all the time of how wonderful it is that the glass is even half-full when it could easily be, and has so often been, empty. Ritual maintenance, whether physical or spiritual, personal or cultural, is the practice of honoring that.

It’s not all grim stoicism and emergency preparedness drills, though. In her essay “Marrying Libraries,” Anne Fadiman quipped about her husband being closely allied with the forces of entropy. I, too, know what it is to share living space with one of the enemy’s agents. We have a running joke that I’m the robot butler who repeatedly insists on removing Donald Duck’s hat in “Modern Inventions,” except in my case, it’s coffee cups and clothing which need to be picked up and put where they belong despite vociferous protest. I don’t mind these homeopathic doses of chaos, though. Like Hoffer said a few times throughout his writings, it’s the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls, and only stretched souls make music.

Every now and then, I go on Amazon and search for books about Montaigne. I’m not exactly sure why I do this.

What I mean is, reading about Montaigne is no substitute for just reading the man himself. Aside from a few minor points which may have gotten lost in translation over the centuries and require an explanatory footnote, the Essays themselves are pretty straightforward. No tour guide necessary. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, said he never had the urge to write until after reading Montaigne. He related a story of being snowbound in a mining camp with a copy of the Essays for company, where he read it three times and knew it almost by heart. When he returned to migratory work in the San Joaquin Valley, he quoted the book so often that his fellow workers would ask him, “What does Montaigne say?” to settle various arguments. One bunkmate borrowed the book for an hour and said upon returning it, “Anyone can write a book like this.”

Well — not exactly, but it’s easy to see how he (and many others) could get that impression. Montaigne is very approachable and conversational. But it’s not easy to write about your own thoughts and impressions without falling into “Dear Diary” self-absorption; the trick is in using those thoughts and impressions to make interesting connections with the wider world that strangers will find relevant enough to read and care about. And let’s not forget that a well-turned phrase isn’t something that most people can toss off effortlessly. For most of us, including Montaigne, it takes a lot of practice and a fair amount of revising and rewriting. As the popular meme might put it, “One does not simply step into Montaigne’s shoes.”

So what am I hoping to find with a book like Michael Perry’s Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy? Do I expect, mutatis mutandis, a modern version of the original? I don’t think so, and not just because there are some mighty trees which cast too wide of a shadow for anything else to grow in close proximity. Ben Schott, for example, has recently published an homage to P.G. Wodehouse, in which he puts Jeeves and Wooster through some new adventures. Now, as someone who would love to hear that some medium had started channeling a steady supply of new stories through the restless shade of Wodehouse, am I going to read Schott’s version? Not on your life. The slightest difference in character or dialogue would feel to me as the pea did to the princess. It’s unfair to expect someone to improve upon perfection, and it’s hubristic to try. Besides, what would it even mean to say that someone is “like” Montaigne? One of the most irritating low-wattage bulbs of comparative illumination I’ve ever seen flickers on the jacket of several of Theodore Dalrymple’s books, where it is claimed that he is “the Orwell of our time.” All I can think about when I see that is how many ways the two men are absolutely nothing alike, which I’m sure was not the intention. How would one transport the quiddity of a writer like Montaigne across five centuries and have it arrive in a recognizable condition?

Is it novelty, then? Am I hoping to learn something new that I didn’t already know? Possibly, but deep down, at least, I know better. Damon Linker once offered a suggestion why political conservatives are underrepresented in the humanities — he thought it was because the research model of the modern university incentivizes “progress” in knowledge, which is ill-suited for the study of classic writers and thinkers who can’t be improved upon. The only way to make Shakespeare, Montaigne, etc. “relevant” today is to study them in the context of our current ephemeral fixations — race, gender, oppression, and sundry other grievances. Likewise, it’s very doubtful there’s anything left to be excavated from the literature on Montaigne, just dust and bone fragments of interest only to narrow specialists. Philippe Desan recently published a new “mythbusting” biography of Montaigne which, I am reliably informed, was a dully-written academic hatchet job aiming to reduce its subject to an opportunistic hypocrite. If that’s what scholarship is typically producing, I’m not interested.

The Lady of the House read Perry’s book immediately after I did. As she comes from genuinely rural, cow-centric origins, she was skeptical at first, thinking that the whole concept seemed a bit too gimmicky, like a printed-page reality show designed by a New York publisher: “Hey, let’s take a 16th-century French nobleman and make him roommates with a modern-day Wisconsin roughneck! Imagine the wacky hijinks!” (Perry does relate one amusing anecdote of a former, yes, New York-based publicist who wanted to throw a book release party for him and his neighbors and asked where she might go about renting gingham tablecloths and genuine straw bales. “I guess she assumed I’d supply my own overalls and banjo,” he said.) There was one passage in particular early on in the book:

Among all the chickens randomly ravaging the slop on any given morning, there is always one who locates a prize hunk of glop, nabs it, then darts into the weeds, hoping to choke it down before the other chickens catch on. The tactic is rarely successful, as there are always two or three other birds in hot pursuit, trying to rip the morsel from the first chicken’s beak or snatch it should it fall to the ground. But now and then one lucky bird scores and makes a clean escape. And then, safely out of sight, the bird discovers the treasured goodie is too big to swallow. And so it is you will sometimes return to the pen an hour later to find the same chicken trying to gag down a knob of gristle thrice the caliber of its gullet. Unwilling to turn it loose, the bird stands there blinking in perplexity.

I am that chicken. I read the experts’ erudite, multi-layered, cross-referential deconstructions and am left blinking, uncertain how to proceed, but unwilling to give up, hoping if nothing else to absorb some mental nutrition via proximity and osmosis.

She thought this almost seemed to pander to the expectation of, say, the quintessential NPR listener who happened to be reading. Aw, isn’t that just so folksy! But as a fellow under-educated fowl — nobody here but us chickens! — I appreciated what he was saying here. I, too, have had to make up in graft what I lack in formal education. And to be fair, how else is he supposed to put it? Take the particular and make it universal. If his “particular” is a Midwestern farm, so be it. It only seems jarring because of the background assumption that people “like him” don’t read Montaigne, and why should that be? If Montaigne is surrendered to the academics, well, we’ve already seen how that will turn out.

The book is very colloquial and conversational; I breezed through it over two bedtime reading sessions. I wouldn’t say it was profound, but I still felt kindly disposed toward it. I winced a bit to see him approach the concept of intersectionality in his musings, but I had to admit that Montaigne himself would have probably been just as sanguine and interested in the topic were he to visit us (Perry even managed to find an impressively reasonable quotation from Roxane Gay, which must have taken no small amount of effort and open-mindedness). Thankfully, the book wasn’t overly weighed down by the trendy and topical. I suppose I just like the idea of sitting around having an informal discussion about Montaigne, even one conducted through the temporal and spatial distance of the written word. The aforementioned chicken image also made me realize that whenever I feel like I’ve truly understood something, it’s been through a skillful metaphor. In my own writing, the moments I’m proudest of are those when I’ve vividly — and accurately — said, “A is B,” or better yet, I suppose, for being more counterintuitive, “A is Z.” I’m not one for laboriously accumulating details; I generally feel like I get something when I can deftly compare it to something else. Perhaps I just tend to think more in pictures. Or maybe it’s the playful nature of metaphors that appeals to me, the inherent humor of comparing unlike things.

In fact, that’s probably the closest I’ll get to an answer to my original question. I don’t expect to find a modern clone of Montaigne, and I don’t expect to learn anything new about him. I just enjoy seeing other people kick around the ball that he put into play on the field to begin with. I like seeing other people inspired by his example to play with the instruments and techniques that he introduced. Some of the efforts may be decidedly amateur, but there are far worse ways to spend a few hours than thinking or conversing about Montaigne with others, even if only in spirit.

Cosima had committed herself to marriage with von Bülow when she was still in her teens and had been swept away by a concert in Berlin conducted by him. The concert program had included the first Berlin performance of Wagner’s Venusberg music from Tannhaüser. Von Bülow had proposed to her on the same night. Both of them were in love with Wagner and completely transported by his glorious music; one wonders who he was wooing and who she was accepting.

In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Albertine’s professed undying love for the Narrator and his intellect is explained as a result of those mornings when he had just shaved; it was his smooth skin she really loved, though she instinctively rationalized it as something more profound. How many times do these mischievous ghosts hover over our shoulders, redirecting our thoughts, diverting our feelings? How often do we focus on the figure rather than the background as the source of our happiness, only to feel disappointed or betrayed when that surrounding context changes? And yet, how many great things are nonetheless born of those humble parents Inattention and Error?

I remember it well: mid-December 2003. After 3 ½ years of increasing decrepitude, I was a couple of weeks away from finally being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (and treated, thank God). I also had the flu that weekend. But at 3:15 a.m. on Sunday morning, I got the call saying that one of the new carriers was too scared to do her route in the snowstorm. I was needed. Duty called. Out I went to drive around for six or so hours in great physical pain, in a medicated state, in hazardous conditions, making deliveries. My friend Arthur commiserated with my suffering later. I replied that seeing as how the book I was then reading was Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, I didn’t feel like I had it so bad. “I swear, you’ve got to stop wasting your time on these bodice-busters,” he said.

I picked these up last month. A volunteer was restocking the history section, and I saw the Black Book near the top of the banker box when she removed the lid. My face was an impassive mask, but anyone who looked closely might have seen the blaze of avarice behind my eyes lighting up my skull like a jack-o’-lantern. I’d never seen a copy at a sale before, and even used copies typically sell for around fifty bucks online. The rules are that no one can touch any of the new books coming out until the volunteer is completely done and has moved away; we don’t want elbows and books landing on anyone’s head during the scrum. A few fellow vultures had gathered around, attracted by the scent of fresh arrivals. We subtly angled for position, watching each other out of the corners of our eyes, trying not to betray our intentions while planning what to grab first. Finally, she finished and left. Quicker than a striking cobra, my hand flashed out and grabbed the Black Book. Kenny, who had been reaching for it as well, but from a less advantageous position, with a grunt and an index finger gesture signaled his grudging admiration for my having bested him in battle. However, he countered by grabbing the nearby Red Flag before I could. Curses! Am I too proud to beg? Of course not. As the proverb says, all is fair in book-buying. “Aw, c’mon, man, I’ve gotta have the whole set!” I relied on my chutzpah to carry the day; he could have easily noted that the exact same logic applied in his case. Thankfully, he decided that the sales rank/profit ratio wasn’t compelling enough, and he handed it over to me. Frankly, that was just a bonus; I already had my prize, and it only cost me two dollars.

These sorts of books are one version of “memento mori.” Like Gulag, or Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, reading these is a salutary way to be grateful for comfort, grateful for stability, and grateful for abundance. There’s plenty of evil in the world, but there’s something especially horrific about evil utterly convinced of its own rectitude. It’s not that I feel like I need to learn anything more about the theory and practice of communism, but as the resurgent affection for Marxish sentiment among the chattering class shows us, much of life is about remembering things we already know but have dismissed as boring, uncool or outdated.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.